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Adding a cover tag to an audio file

This is mostly a note pad for myself with quick instructions about how to add a “cover” tag to audio files.

I usually add covers to every individual audio file from my albums so I can nicely see them when playing the file either in my computer or mobile. Often, I just use the fantastic Ex Falso application not just to add more advanced tags to my audio files but also for downloading covers from different providers.

Whenever I cannot easily find the cover I’m looking for, I would just scan it and finally save it as a 500×500 pixels JPEG file named as cover.jpg in the same directory than the audio files.

Having this into account, let’s see how to embed the cover as a tag.

MP3 or, rather, id3 tags

For id3 tags I would use the eyeD3 tool. It can be done as easily as running:

Shell

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$eyeD3--add-image=cover.jpg:FRONT_COVER*.mp3

OGG Vorbis

In the case of OGG Vorbis files I follow a little bit more complex steps. I’m sure I could just simplify this in a single step but, by now, I’m too lazy to spend 5 minutes improving this O:)

First, I would add the cover into an individual OGG Vorbis file using the EasyTag application. I could just save the same cover on every file but I wanted to show how to do that in batch mode from the command line.

Therefore, as I said, I just save the cover into and individual file an extract all the tags from such file using the vorbiscomment tool:

Shell

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$vorbiscomment-l<file>.oga>comments.txt

Then, I would modify the comments.txt file so it will only contain the needed art cover tags and append them to the rest of the files:

Shell

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$vorbiscomment-a-ccomments.txt<other_file>.oga

Hopefully, I will update this in the future with a single command to do it in a go and will also review how to be able to just link the proper cover from the audio files. Also, I will try to explain the logic for the naming of the covers in the local directory without having to add the tag to any file so crawlers like Tracker will just do the work for us.